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Unreasonable spouse? Demanding kids? Argumentative friends? If it sometimes feels like these
stressors are killing you, new research suggests you might be right.

Middle-aged adults who frequently fought with their husband or wife were more than twice as
likely to die at a relatively young age compared with people who rarely fought, according to a
study published online this week in the
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Frequent fights with friends were even more hazardous — people who fell into this category were
2.6 times more likely to die prematurely than people who got along with their pals.

Worst of all were persistent fights with neighbors, the researchers found. These types of
argumentative people were more than three times more likely to die prematurely than the
go-with-the-flow types.

Even when fights didn’t break out into the open, simply worrying about friends or loved ones or
stewing over their demands could be enough to shorten one’s life. People who “always” or “often”
fretted about their spouse were almost twice as likely to die during the course of the study
compared with those who seldom fretted. In addition, those who expended lots of negative mental
energy on their children were 55 percent more likely to die prematurely compared with those who
didn’t worry about their kids very often.

All of these associations between stressful social relations and the risk of early death were
stronger for men than for women, the researchers found. They also were stronger for people who were
not working outside the home.

The study, published on Thursday, was based on data from nearly 10,000 Danish adults who were
between the ages of 36 and 52 in 2000. All of them answered questions about their conflicts with
and worries about their partners, children, other family, friends and neighbors. About 6 percent of
them said they had frequent conflicts with their spouse; 6 percent had frequent conflicts with
their children; 2 percent had frequent conflicts with other family members; and 1 percent had
frequent conflicts with friends. Worries and demands that didn’t escalate to outright conflict were
slightly more common.

In addition, the researchers used government health files to see how many of the study
participants had died through the end of 2011. Over the 11 years of the study, 4 percent of the
women and 6 percent of the men died (most often of cancer, but also due to cardiovascular disease,
alcohol abuse and accidents, among other causes).

Those deaths were not evenly spread among people who experienced lots of conflict and people who
didn’t. The more conflict in a person’s life, the more likely he or she had died, the researchers
found. This probably wasn’t a coincidence.

“Personality has been shown to influence social relationships and mortality,” they wrote. People
with disagreeable personalities are likely to have more stress in their lives, and stress prompts
the body to make molecules like cortisol and pro-inflammatory cytokines that can make people
sick.

If public-health policymakers are looking for new ways to reduce premature deaths in their
communities, the researchers had a suggestion: Offer classes on conflict management.